Keeping Food on the Table

This New York Times Op-Ed piece draws attention to a new report called called “Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change”  It is a compelling read (for a report!), and although it takes as its theme the threat climate change poses to our food supply, many of the issues it discusses are more systemic....such as the meat loving diets of wealthy countries.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Check out this  interesting story that was on NPR recently.  It illustrates the challenges we increasingly face as the dominant management stewards of the planet.  Almond growers in CA rely on large numbers of domesticated honeybees to pollinate their crop.  Their reliance on this one species is partly a function of the giant almond orchards themselves.  The orchards replaced the diverse vegetation that supported large numbers and diversity of local native bees, requiring the farmers to turn to commercially supplied replacements.  However, once the almonds stop flowering, the region suddenly becomes a floral desert for bees.  So bee wranglers move the bees to where there are flowers.  Amazingly, all the way to North Dakota!  However, as commodity prices have risen for things like corn, Dakotan farmers are replacing flowers with corn.  This is beginning to put the bee wranglers in a bind.

The story itself is brief, but there are a lot of issues embedded here, from payment for ecosystem service schemes, to the impact of large scale agriculture on biodiversity, to our reliance on a handful of species and their expert management for our global food supply.

Complete Makeover

Episode 1: Retrofitting Suburbia (preview all episodes here) from MPC on Vimeo.

Style and design seem to age in one of two ways.  Things either become retro chic classics or they turn into cautionary tales of wrong headed thinking.....case in point: leisure suits.  A number of scientists and public policy specialists are arguing that the design of our cities since WW II is definitely in the leisure suit category.  But unlike the aesthetically odd,but mostly harmless leisure suit, they argue that the recent design of our cities has contributed to a host of serious problems including the epidemics of obesity, diabetes and stress, the social isolation of teenagers and the elderly, and the loss of ecosystem services.   This interesting series explores these issues and looks at some of the ways people are rethinking the design of our urban spaces.  From the website:

A provocative new 4-hour series, "Designing Healthy Communities." Host/Narrator Richard Jackson, MD, MPH, looks at the impact our built environment has on key public health indices – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, cancer and depression. Dr. Jackson connects bad community design with burgeoning health costs, then analyzes and illustrates what citizens are doing about this urgent crisis by looking upstream for innovative solutions.

9 Billion Mouths

Check out this great website put together by the Center for Investigative Reporting.  From the website:

"Food for 9 Billion" is a yearlong examination of the challenge of feeding the world at a time of growing demand, changing diets, rising food and energy prices, shrinking land and water resources, and accelerating climate change. It is a collaborative project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, Homelands Productions, PBS NEWSHOUR and American Public Media's Marketplace.

Conservation Crossroads

Both the science and practice of conservation seem to be sitting at a crossroads.  In one direction is a preservation path that has helped save some precious parts of  our world's biodiversity legacy.  Preservation tools include creating biodiversity preserves,  restoring degraded habitats and landscapes, and as a last resort preserving germplasm in captive breeding programs.  However, in recent years a number of people have started to argue that preservation alone is not sufficient...or even in many cases a misguided  approach.  They argue that conservation (and the environmental movement in general)  needs to take a less idealistic and more pragmatic path that is focused more on achieving functional goals and less on broadly preserving past natural history.  Clearly, reality is not as dichotomous as that, but there does seem to be a subtle yet profound shift in thinking and outlook going on.  Two recent articles describe this new thinking.  This op-ed piece in the New York Times provocatively titled "The age of Man is not a disaster" is co-authored by Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.  This nice article in the Washington Post also provides a nice summary of the new ideas.

Also, in book club this term we are reading "Rambunctious garden: saving nature in a post-wild world" by Emma Marris" (the lead author of that NYT op-ed piece.  Check out the short video by Emma.

Power of the People

The BBC adds this interesting take to the flurry of human population related news stories that have come out over the past week or so (anyone know what the impetus for these have been?).  Here is the question posed by the BBC story:

As the world population reaches seven billion people, the BBC's Mike Gallagher asks whether efforts to control population have been, as some critics claim, a form of authoritarian control over the world's poorest citizens.

Unfortunately, ideas for how to manage human population growth do indeed have a history that is more than a little tinged with the inequities associated with race, class, and socio-economic power.  The eugenics and Social Darwin movements are cases in point.  More recently, the Sierra Club experienced a vigorous internal debate over its stance on population growth and immigration (mostly the illigal kind) into the US.  The beginning of this article gives a brief synopsis.  The potential inequities associated with managing human population have also been explored in a number of movies and books.  In Time just out in theatres has a Logan's Run-esque plot: people are only allowed to live until 25 as a way to sustainably manage resource use on the planet.  However, rich people can buy their way out the social contract....they get to live forever!

And of course managing population growth also always involves a whole other range of hot button issues such as the proper role of government in people's lives, abortion and other methods of contraception, and  religion.  Its perhaps because of these complexities that population growth is rarely talked about explicitly when we are thinking about sustainable resource management.

The Oldest Conflict

I came across yet another story this week about the growing human demand for the world's resources.  This one is from this month's National Geographic and is about the Albertine Rift, part of the Great Rift Valley in Africa. The Rift Valley is where we have the first evidence of our earliest human ancestors, and for want of more detailed information we can probably think of it as the cradle of human civilization.  Today, it is a place of enormous natural resource capital and intense competition for that capital by humans.  This resource competition is probably one of the underlying causes of the horrific violence that has plagued the region over the past several decades.  In fact many of our conflicts tend to come down to battles over resources.  See this video of Wangari Maathai talking about the relationship between conflicts and resources.